3. Online teaching should not be downgraded to “facilitation”.
“While facilitation is of course an important aspect of teaching, we argue in this manifesto that good online teaching is very much more than this.” (Bayne et al (2020) “Manifesto for Teaching Online” p.32)
This for me is at the very core of the role of digital education within education as a whole. All too often, online teaching is seen as the means to an end, with the teacher’s role being ‘to lubricate, or facilitate’. (Bayne et al (2020) “Manifesto for Teaching Online” ) Equally, it is too often assumed that the learner will automatically know how best to use a digital programme, which can lead to hours of the learner getting caught up in the systems of communication rather than the content matter which is being taught. This is particularly true of children and teenagers who will happily make a video, forgetting the educational reason behind the task set.
As a teacher, I have always placed enormous importance on how a teacher delivers a lesson. In training sessions, I have emphasised how important body language is, how the tone of one’s voice and how one uses it can transform a mundane lesson into a more dynamic one. The pace of a lesson is vital to ensuring learner engagement. To have the confidence to change tack halfway through a lesson when you realise you have ‘lost’ the students. These things are hard to replicate in online teaching.
Train the teachers!
Teachers need to be trained in more than the basic tools. They need to be given the time to explore what they can do with the technology. All too often, in the last year, I have seen astounding examples of ‘lazy’ teaching. The teacher cannot be accused of shying away from the digital opportunities, yet the teacher manages to manipulate them in such a way as to produce a tedious lesson; at the very worst involving photographing a page in a text book, sending it to the student on OneNote and asking the student to scan the answer back. Admittedly, the teacher is often overwhelmed with pressure and time constraints, so it is little wonder that they don’t manage to engage innovatively with the technology they are expected to intuitively master. At its worst, online teaching can be a conveyor belt of information; at its best, it allows the teacher to provoke and challenge thought.
Could one say that an education system is only as good as its teachers? In 2014, the UNESCO theme for World Teachers Day was ‘Invest in the future, invest in teachers’.
It would be interesting to research how many PGCEs in the UK are providing specific digital education training. Amy Gibbons, writing in the TES in October 2020 entitled her article: ‘Urgent’ call to train teachers in ‘digital learning’, where she reported that initial teacher training has little, if any focus on digital learning. https://www.tes.com/news/coronavirus-urgent-call-train-teachers-digital-learning.
Whilst in Scotland, the government has set up a Working Group to develop the ‘National Framework for Digital Literacies in Initial Teacher Education: https://digitalliteracyframework.scot/. Surely, this must become a focus for the development of online teaching?
I was lucky enough to attend a conference in Nairobi in February 2020 for the launch of the “Digital Roadmap: how developing countries can get ahead”. Published by the Pathways for Prosperity Commission, Oxford, it lays out pragmatic recommendations for developing countries that want to seize the opportunities of technology. https://pathwayscommission.bsg.ox.ac.uk/The report notes that “The impact of digital technologies in education is stronger when they are integrated into teachers’ practice and the wider system”. There is much work happening in developing countries to improve educational opportunities for children and young adults. The Bridge International Academies is an interesting example of using technology to support teachers in developing countries, by training them, providing them with digitised teaching materials and a tablet-based teacher planning and feedback system. The educational model employed by the Bridge Academies recognises that the role of the teacher can benefit from digital innovations without compromising their pedagogical professionalism. Have a look at this short video which encapsulates its philosophy:
In conclusion, I think that to say that online teaching risks being ‘downgraded’ to facilitation is not to recognise that facilitation can be a good aspect of teaching. Somehow, the technology must liberate the teacher to be a creative and innovative practitioner. If the teacher is put at the centre of the digital future, invested in as heavily as the technology is being invested in, then I think the future of online teaching will be very exciting.
Another good post with an engaging mix of your own reflections and other sources of information. One thing to consider in these sort of posts is being a bit more explicit about your argument: what distinguishes teaching from facilitation and why might digital education be complicit in the promotion of facilitation over teaching? The substantive points regarding the wider purposes of education and the importance of teachers’ professional judgement.
We’ve had similar issues in higher education with many academics not being interested in developing the digital skills and literacies of teaching and learning until forced to by the pandemic. Supporting an awful lot of digital development has been interesting indeed!
It will be interesting in Scotland to see what happens with the national framework you linked to. The conceptual underpinning of the adopted approach (TPACK) is robust but whether ‘the digital’ becomes limited to a couple of formal sessions on digital literacies in each ITE programme or become mainstreamed across all aspects of the ITE programme, will be a key issue.